One’s initial impression is that this is a calendar: a landscape format A3 block with colour photographs, held together with cold glue in the Swiss binding style and pasted into a thick brown corrugated cardboard cover. The only text, the publishing details, has been placed under the photo block on the inside of the cardboard outer, plus the title on the front in big Franklin Gothic Condensed. The photo block comes without captions: all you can do is let the photos sink in. The photos themselves are all bled off and most are in landscape format; they are of night-time scenes of people at home or in some other enclosed space. Sometimes the cool twilight of evening can be seen through a window. Two photos are of handwritten letters. The interiors are occasionally interspersed with desolate mountainscapes photographed at various times of day. These bare, snow-covered landscapes are printed on thinner and more fibrous paper and emphasize the lonely, existential atmosphere of the people and interior photos.

The panel were impressed by the evocative, cinematic photographs and the way the consistency of their selection and placing helps them tell a story of the human condition, ‘my useless existence’ (see sheet 10), poverty, the isolation of isolation, and loneliness. The spareness of the design, the paper used, the excellent printing and the sequence in which the images are presented – they all serve the photographs and the photographer’s narrative, and her subject.